dell windows xp runs super slow?

unkel

beauf wrote: »

On an old machine they probably may not have the RAM to spare.

Aye but even a tiny Ramdisk might make a lot of a difference. I've been browsing for a while and I have about a dozen tabs open and my Ramdisk is only using 100MB atm. Set the Ramdisk to 50MB if you can't spare any more...

unkel

Dravokivich wrote: »

Up until 6 years ago they were running nt4.

Maybe they should invest a bit more in infrastructure and a bit less in salaries?

Dravokivich

unkel wrote: »

Maybe they should invest a bit more in infrastructure and a bit less in salaries?

They also do in house software development. A lot of reason for the delay in moving to xp was due to dependencies in the software that were obsolete. Which will be an issue again moving up from xp. Depending on the changes they've brought since.

Irish Steve

Bank of Ireland IT is an unmitigated disaster, they got rid of all the people that understood their mainframe application, and then as things have had to be changed, just about everything has been grafted on external to the core application, a lot of the time in batch mode, and the result is a dogs breakfast that on occasions does things like show the same transaction on a user statement twice, because the batch update is running, and it hasn't yet worked out that the original transaction and the "new" transaction have to be merged. The functionality of the on line systems has been reduced in a lot of areas compared even to a couple of years ago, supposedly due to the requirements of SEPA, but more likely because they weren't prepared to spend the money required to properly implement SEPA in a real time manner, so much of the new processing is done in a batch manner on the edges of the on line real time systems that are at the core of the operation.

It's only in the last couple of months that they have managed to work out how to get their core business on line package to work with browsers other than Internet Explorer, and move it away from a fixed screen resolution of 800 x 600 (VGA), which went out of use back in the days of the Ark.

Don't ask them to put a unique transaction reference number on a lodgement made through an electronic teller in branch, they can't, so there's now no way to have an absolute audit transaction trail that cross references the slip from the machine with the entry on the statement, despite having had unique reference numbers on paper based lodgements and the statements for a very long time.

There are other equally annoying issues, but hey, Bank of Ireland don't seem to see them as being significant enough to change.

Grade 1 muppets.

And yes, I do know a bit about banking systems, I was working with on line real time banking when the UK changed over to Decimal currency a LONG time ago, and the branches were connected by 1200 Baud dedicated data lines to their computer centre, which was IBM 360 mainframe based.

Aimead

unkel wrote: »

Was shocked to see today that Ulster Bank is still using XP in their branches

You can understand why though. If you have a software suite deployed on a load of machines then an OS replacement becomes a problem. I’ve heard anecdotally of some cases where the original programmers aren’t around anymore (similar to what Irish Steve describes), so when the software doesn’t work on the new OS the technical talent needed to fix it just isn’t there.

---

The (really good) idea of putting Linux on the machine has been floated, but since the machine is pre-UEFI and pre-secureboot it should be easy enough to free up space for a partition and go dual boot. It just means the existing files will be accessible to Linux without needing to do a shed-load of copying, and the computer will still have XP if needed for the occasional XP-specific task.